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Learning to Listen

DR. RITA CHARON, professor of clinical medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, is well aware of the power of storytelling. She has a Ph.D. in English — training that changed her medical practice.

Through literature, she learned how stories are built and told, and translated that to listening to, and better understanding, patients. She could let them tell their own stories without interruptions and see how people described their symptoms as part of the larger story of their life.

Dr. Charon was not the first to connect literature and medicine, but she has become the leading advocate of the emerging discipline known as narrative medicine, which aims to treat the whole person, not just the illness. The British Medical Journal and other professional publications have run articles on the approach, and medical schools have added writing seminars and reading groups.

Dr. Charon had spent several years teaching workshops on developing “narrative competence,” but she feared participants weren’t prepared enough to return to their schools to start programs. There was no comprehensive training in how to practice it.

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Illustration by Viktor Koen

She proposed something new to Columbia: a Master of Science in narrative medicine. The one-year program — two if pursued part time — began this fall at its School of Continuing Education.

“We hoped to get 8 to 10 people willing to pay the $50,000,” she says. The program ended up with 28 students, most of them midcareer professionals — doctors, nurses, social workers, lawyers, literary scholars. Others included recent college graduates headed toward medical school.

Courses this semester focus on philosophy, literary theory, psychoanalytic theory, autobiography and the close reading of literature involving experiences of illness.

Dr. Charon says there’s no obvious job market for people with a master’s degree in narrative medicine. But with new programs starting all the time, she says, “our graduates will be particularly well prepared to join such efforts.”

Some who enrolled, like Dr. Susan Ball, say they hope to become better doctors. Dr. Ball, associate professor of medicine at New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center, says she also would like to start a narrative medicine program at Cornell for resident physicians and older doctors.

Karen Schmidt is not sure what she will do with the new degree. A deputy director at Columbia’s Earth Institute, she works on public health projects in Africa. Ms. Schmidt is a part-time student and so, she says, “I have a couple of years to work it out.”